Renaissance Music: Music in Western Europe, 1400-1600, and: Music in the Age of the Renaissance (review)

Renaissance Music: Music in Western Europe, 1400-1600. By Allan W. Atlas. (The Norton Introduction to Music History.) New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. [xxi, 729 p. ISBN 0-393-97169-4. $32.]

Music in the Age of the Renaissance. By Leeman L. Perkins. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. [xviii, 1147 p. ISBN 0-393-04608-7. $45.]

One of the greatest influences on the last half-century of musicology has been the house of Norton. For six decades, its introductory surveys of music history (e.g., Paul Henry Lang, Music in Western Civilization [1941]; Donald J. Grout, A History of Western Music [1960; various subsequent editions]) have molded the thinking of North American music majors, commanding a share of the textbook market that other publishers can only dream of having. In the last two years, Norton has finally replaced Music in the Renaissance by Gustave Reese (1954) and has added a textbook on Renaissance music to its series aimed at undergraduates (The Norton Introduction to Music History). These two publications will ensure Norton's hegemony in the field of Renaissance studies, a position that is well deserved, for what other publishing house would dare to issue two new Renaissance music surveys and an accompanying anthology of scores (Anthology of Renaissance Music: Music in Western Europe, 1400-1600, ed. Allan W. Atlas [1998]) in two successive fiscal years?

These books remind one how much musicology and Renaissance studies have changed since Reese drafted his monumental work by hand on his clipboard. In the early fifties, musicologists had access to only a few collected editions of music by Renaissance composers, Armen Carapetyan's American Institute of Musicology was still in the process of issuing its initial titles for the series Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, and the fifth edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians (ed. Eric Blom, 9 vols. [London: Macmillan, 1954]) was not yet available. Now, nearly a half-century later, there is arguably an excess of graduate programs across North America, whose faculty and students have been producing a steady stream of scholarly editions, treatise translations, biographies, archival findings, and studies on genre, notation, and performance practice. Whereas Reese usually had to turn to his piano if he hoped to hear most of the music he was analyzing, we now have an active early-music recording industry eagerly promoting anthologies that would have seemed truly esoteric in the early fifties.

The two authors reviewed here offer some intriguing similarities: both teach in New York City, both presumably have access to the same sources (indeed, Allan W. Atlas thanks Leeman L. Perkins for sharing his material before it was published), and each has edited and studied an important Renaissance chansonnier. Their surveys, however, are quite different in style, approach, and accessibility. Perkins was asked to write a replacement for the earlier benchmark study by Reese, whereas the volume by Atlas is Norton's first attempt at producing a Renaissance music survey for undergraduates and for graduate students not specializing in musicology.

My students tell me that Atlas's somewhat informal style of scholarly writing is easily accessible, that the internal organization of the chapters is clear to them, and that they appreciate his sense of humor. Consequently, topics that initially promise to be as dry as archival dust spring to life (for example, "Learning from Documents: Payroll and Inventory Notices" [chap. 8]). Although the facsimiles (figs. 8-1 and 8-2) are so severely reduced that students initially felt defeated when trying to read them without magnification, they were able to follow the written modern description of them and came to appreciate that there is another world of investigation available to those who persevere with palaeography and language studies.

The rather broad approach Atlas takes in his survey shows that the writing of music history textbooks is starting to...